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I have a similar generation laptop (Dell Latitude D600), with the PAE problem, on which I am successfully running Linux Mint 17 and also other Ubuntu-derived distros. It’s actually got much easier with the most recent releases (Mint 17 and Ubuntu 14.04) as there is now a parameter ‘forcepae’ that you can add to the command line when you start your installation.

Have a look at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PAE for further details.

I actually prefer Lubuntu to Mint for such elderly hardware. The other challenge I had with Linux on my laptop was getting the drivers for the Broadcom wireless adapter to install. There are various online resources which address this. I found http://tech.rickumali.com/blog/2012/02/04/making-wireless-work-dell-d600-ubuntu very useful.

I’m with TSOHost https://www.tsohost.com/, which I moved to when I stopped using PlusNet’s free hosting. I have the GBP 14.99 p.a. Lite Hosting, which gives me web hosting and email (with IMAP and web frontend) for two domains. I also use them as registrar for my domains as their fees are very reasonable. I’ve been very happy with the service I get. I originally saw them recommended by several knowledgeable people on PlusNet’s User Forums.

When I moved away from my Palm LifeDrive, I transferred my data out. The challenge was to get it into a standards-based format. For calendar, which is the hardest to export and get it right, that’s iCal. There’s quite a lot of info on doing this but I quite liked the sound of palm2ical http://hepunx.rl.ac.uk/~adye/software/palm/palm2ical/, which is written by Tim Adye at Rutherford Labs in the UK. So, I followed his advice on getting the database file off my LifeDrive successfully and ran his program to get an iCal file.

Perhaps this program will be useful to you.

For the record, I now have my data (contacts and calendar) in Google’s cloud and sync it very successfully with a variety of Android devices, Windows Phone and with Thunderbird (plus the Lightning calendar extension) running under both Windows and Linux.

I too recently gave up using my Palm Lifedrive as PDA and looked at various options that would let me use an Android phone instead with a decent PC desktop client. Getting out of Palm’s proprietary calendar format with as much information preserved as possible was clearly important and I eventually used palm2ical to get my Palm calendar into iCal format. I then imported this into Google Calendar. If I were doing it again, I’d import each Palm category separately into a corresponding Google calendar (this allows you to have different colours for each calendar). There’s a command-line parameter to palm2ical that allows you to process a category at a time.

I then installed the Lightning extension for Thunderbird on my desktop and synced the calendars with Google using CalDev, which is the method Google document. The first sync took quite a while and I was plagued with hundreds of reminders for meetings that were long past. Should have turned off the option for reminding about missed meetings first. Once I got that out of the way, all was fine and I’ve been syncing to two PCs and an Android phone without problems for a couple of weeks now.

I’m also syncing my contacts over the same platforms. I exported my Palm contacts by category (Friends/Neighbours/Tradespeople/etc.) in vCard format (rather than CSV) and then imported each category into Google Contacts. I also imported my email addressbook and phone no. database from my old mobile into Google Contacts. This resulted in quite a lot of overlap/duplication but there’s quite a good Google tool for finding and merging duplicates, which I used extensively. I chose the gContactSync Thunderbird extension to sync my addressbook with Google (there are a few choices but I liked the look of this one).

So far, all’s going very well. Pity the Android phone has such a pathetic battery life :(.

Leila

I too thought from its title that this article would tell me how to make an XP installation CD with all the hotfixes since SP3 slipstreamed in. Not remotely what we got. How misleading and how very disappointing.